He sets his hands on my shoulders, then takes my chin between his fingers, claws pricking at my skin, and tilts my head back.
My gaze fixes on the teal sky, and that’s when I see them—all four moons.
They’re faint in the daylight, but massive compared to what Earth has. Something in me wells up, emotion trapped in my throat.
“I think I want to cry.”
He huffs softly. “Most humans are overwhelmed the first time they set foot here. It gets easier.”
“Was Earth like this for you?”
He’s quiet for a long moment, then he says, “Not until I saw the water.”
“The…water?”
“The sea. The…” He hesitates, and then I realize he’s talking about the Great Lakes. “We do not have that here. No seas aboveland. No oceans. All of our water is beneath the ground. When I first saw it, it was vast and strange.”
I want to pull him against me, but I know I can’t. We might be able to break social protocol on Earth, but here, he’s a commander. He’s important. I won’t do that to him.
“Where are we going?” I ask as he urges me to follow along.
“My home. It isn’t far.” He points up a hilly, cobbled street.
“Do you have cars, or are we walking?”
Making a humming noise of amusement in the back of his throat, he shakes his head. “Little human. You have no problem running in your world. You would not run in mine?”
“I…” I don’t want to tell him my knees are still wobbling.
He points to a set of two posts close together that seem to have very little purpose at all, but when he pulls me toward them and places his hand on the right one, it shimmers.
“Another portal?”
“It is convenient.”
Fan-fucking-tastic, I think as he steps through, and I don’t get more than a second to breathe before I’m tumbling after him.
I don’t feel the urge to throw up this time, so that’s a plus. And I’m not sure what I expected out of Rathyn’s house, but the way he was so fucking fussy about his living quarters at The Foundry, I expected a damn palace.
His place is large—made from the same stone that emits light and heat—but it’s sparsely furnished. There’s a massive…thing that might be called a couch in the center of the room with a dozen blankets that might be made of some kind of monster animal fur.
There are shelves lined with books and plants I couldn’t possibly name in ceramic pots, and one wall is entirely made of windows, showing off vast, rolling hills and tall mountains that cascade past cities to what looks like small villages.
I can’t help but press my face against it. It’s cool and thick and oddly textured, and I rub my fingers over it as I stare across the horizon.
“Can we go there?” I press my finger to the glass over the spot where the farthest mountain is.
He steps up behind me, wrapping his tail around my leg, his arms around my waist, and he breathes in my scent. “We cannot.”
“Forbidden?”
“Unsafe.” His lips trail a touch over my neck, and I shudder. Fuck, I love that he loves kissing. “While we have won the war, there are still factions of angry Tarek hidden in the hills. I will not put you in harm’s way.”
I didn’t know about the war, but I know better than to prod for information. He feeds it to me in small bursts, and I consume them the way his people seem to consume language.
“Do you only speak English? Like, on Earth?”
He huffs a soft, rumbling laugh. “No. I am also fluent in Italian, French, Mandarin, Arabic, and Urdu.”
